With the advance of mobile communication, 3rd Generation Partnership Program (3GPP) introduced the concept of Home NodeB (HNB), or Home eNodeB (HeNB) which are usually deployed as minimised access nodes. The use of these minimised access nodes allows mobile operators to extend their coverage or roll out new services at much faster speed and lower cost. Such nodes leverage upon the existing broadband network facilities of the user and usually translate to lower resource costs as well as relaxed lawful interception requirements for a mobile operator. For the user, connecting via the HNB or HeNB usually means reduced fees and additional services.
With this introduction of consumer premises based access node, 3GPP also created use cases for local IP access (see the following Non-patent Document 1). With the Local IP Access (LIA), a User Equipment (UE) accessing the Close Subscriber Group (CSG) cells of a HNB/HeNB can obtain access to network that is connected to the HNB/HeNB besides the operator's core network. This LIA includes access to the home based network or access to the general Internet without going through the operator's core network. It was also required that the UE can access LIA and the operator's core network at the same time. 3GPP further introduced cases that the UE can access the LIA via a macro-cell.
These new use cases greatly enriched the potential services to be deployed. It also helps to offload some traffic from the core network. Existing operation procedures defined in the following Non-patent Document 2 can be reused to realize these scenarios.